I have just been encouraged to look at Street Complete by some odd notes
I saw.
I installed it to find out what the app does. I was prompted at some
point for my OSM credentials, which I now regret.
The app shows my local area plastered with questions about the road
surface. In the UK residential roads are generally metalled. Are we
really going to add a surface tag to every UK residential road? After I
had entered the choice as an experiment I was expecting a note to appear
- that's why I started looking at the app. When I looked at the road I
discovered it had used my OSM credentials to add a surface tag to the
road. There was no indication this would happen.
It also pointed out a few very short link connections with no name. That
is sensible to me, why would a short (<10m ) link road have a name? When
double confirmed that the road has no name, it added noname=yes to the
road using my credentials, again without telling me.
These seem to be unnecessary tagging.
It also seems to have changed a pedestrian to a service because it has
no name, again quietly.
Lint tools in general suffer from the problem that some people assume
they are errors and fix them without checking. This app has the benefit
of being a lint tool that you can carry around and check because you're
there. However, I think it needs to be more transparent that it is
making a change including specifying what change it is making and I
think the list of 'things to check' seems a bit naive.
--
cheers
Chris Hill (chillly)